The Benefits of Supplemental Digestive Enzymes
The benefits of supplemental digestive enzymes are numerous. If you're enzyme deficient, you'll notice the benefits of enzymes right away when you take supplemental digestive enzymes. Before you finish reading this page, you might want to check our benefits of enzymes questionnaire to see if you have symptoms of an enzyme deficiency.
Cooking our foods at temperatures beyond 120 degrees destroys the enzymes. Ideally we should eat the majority of our food raw, but that's not likely in our modern society. To make things worse, the preservatives used in processed foods contain enzyme inhibitors. Since most people eat mainly cooked and processed food, most of us could benefit from taking supplemental digestive enzymes.
Natural enzymes are found in raw foods. Our body also produces digestive enzymes for breaking down our food. There are two types of digestive enzymes. Digestive or food enzymes are from animals sources and contain the same enzymes that our body produces to digest food. They are made of pancreatic enzymes, hydrochloric acid and bile salts. Plant digestive enzymes are of course from plant sources. They contain enzymes like amylase, lipase, protease, etc. Plant enzymes replace the enzymes that were destroyed during cooking. The basic function of enzymes are to turn the food we eat into nutrients so they can be used by the body. Enzymes are involved in many functions of the body and help with our immunity, detoxification and structural repair. When we eat, the food ends up in the upper part of the stomach first. It stays there for about 20-30 minutes to start predigesting the food. When natural enzymes are present in your diet, you rarely have digestion issues. Up to 1/3 of digestion takes place in the upper stomach if either natural enzymes or supplemental digestive enzymes are present. But when we eat a meal of all cooked foods this pre-digestion doesn't take place and the bulk of the digestive work falls to the stomach and the pancreas. I immediately noticed the benefits of enzymes when I started using digestive enzymes. No more rockin' and rollin' in my tummy! Determining which is the best supplemental digestive enzyme for you depends on many factors. Your age, your diet and your current state of health are all factors in choosing the the best digestive enzymes for yourself. Steven Horne,AHG, an expert in natural health, explained it this way in a class I was taking. If a person's natural digestion process is impaired due to being weak, elderly, illness or injury, then Food Enzymes from animal sources should be used. Because they are the same enzymes that are produced by our own body. Once digestion is improved then it would be appropriate to switch to plant digestive enzymes. Plant digestive enzymes are healthy choices for most everyone else. Steven Horne explains, “There’s nothing wrong with Food Enzymes, but I don’t like doing anything for the body that it should be doing for itself. My thoughts on this are that all chemicals in the body have feedback loops. When levels of a particular substance rise, it shuts down the body’s own production. This, in my opinion, tends to make the body “lazy,” and isn’t restoring natural function.”
To my knowledge there are no digestive enzymes side effects. However, enzymes may be contraindicated if you have stomach ulcers, so check with your healthcare provider before taking them.
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